Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles (born August 21, 1932, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died September 21, 2021, New York, New York) was an American filmmaker who wrote, directed, and starred in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), a groundbreaking film that spearheaded the rush of African American action films known as "blaxploitation" in the 1970s. He also served as the film’s composer and editor.

After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University (B.A., 1953), Van Peebles traveled extensively in Europe, Mexico, and the United States, working a variety of jobs that included painter, postal worker, and street performer along with a stint in the air force. While living in Paris, he wrote several French-language novels, including La Permission (1967), which he turned into his first feature film. The romantic drama was released in France in 1967 and in the United States (as The Story of a Three-Day Pass) the following year. Van Peebles made his Hollywood directorial debut with Watermelon Man (1970), a comedy about racial bigotry. He then turned to his pet project, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Using mostly his own money and relying largely on nonprofessional actors and technicians, Van Peebles told the story of one black man’s battle against white authority. Violent, sexy, and angry, the film scored a huge success with African American audiences (it was one of the top box-office earners that year) while angering many white critics.

Van Peebles had begun a musical career with the album Brer Soul (1969), which featured a mostly spoken vocal style that prefigured rap. He subsequently moved into Broadway musical theatre, adapting some of his recorded songs for the production Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971) and one of his novels for Don’t Play Us Cheap! (1972; film 1973). Thereafter he continued to write, act, compose, and direct for films, television, and the stage. Subsequent films in which he appeared included O.C. and Stiggs (1985), Boomerang (1992), The Hebrew Hammer (2003), and Peeples (2013). With the comedy Identity Crisis (1989), he ended a 16-year hiatus from screen directing, and he later wrote and directed Le Conte du ventre plein (2000; Bellyful) and Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (2008); none of these efforts, however, were widely seen. In addition to his entertainment career, Van Peebles became involved in commodities trading in the 1980s and was the first African American to hold a seat on the American Stock Exchange.

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Van Peebles’s son Mario, who played the character Sweetback as a boy in the 1971 film, became a noted film actor and director in his own right. Besides directing his father in such films as the western Posse (1993) and Armed (2018), Mario cowrote, directed, and starred in the feature Baadasssss! (2003), about the making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.